ENSv2 Vote Would Freeze New .eth Registrations on the Old Registrar

ENS Labs wants the ENS DAO to switch on ENSv2, the rebuild of how .eth names work. If the vote passes, new .eth registrations stop on the old v1 registrar and move to the new system.

What actually changes

The proposal, posted to the ENS governance forum by founder Nick Johnson on Oct. 11, bundles 15 calls from the DAO timelock into one atomic transaction. Those calls strip every controller from the v1 BaseRegistrar and hand ownership to a renew-only contract called ETHRenewerV1, which can renew names but cannot register new ones or add controllers.

The full v2 contract set is already deployed on Ethereum mainnet, with the v2 registrar live but not yet authorised to accept names. Activation runs in five stages, and only one of them needs a DAO vote.

Your name is safe, mostly

If you already own a .eth name and do nothing, it keeps working — there is no deadline to migrate. You can move it to v2 through the ENS app whenever you like, and renewing on v1 also extends your reservation on v2.

One detail worth checking: v2 cuts the post-expiry grace period to 28 days from 90. To make up the difference, every name's v2 expiry is extended by 62 days. Names already expired past grace do not carry over, and become free for anyone to grab on v2.

Between the proposal executing and v2 going live, nobody can register a new name on either version — a gap Labs expects to last a few hours.

Why this matters

ENSv2 swaps the flat 2017 registry for a hierarchy of registries, where every name can run its own registry for subnames and permissions become fine-grained roles instead of irreversible fuses. That is meant to retire the NameWrapper's workarounds, on the piece of ENS its own team calls the hardest to follow.

The trade-off is real. The v1 freeze can be undone by another DAO vote, but a migrated name cannot — migrated v1 tokens land in a Graveyard contract with no way back, and v1 loses its emergency controller switch. Apps and resolvers also have to support both versions for the foreseeable future.

For traders, the fee flow is the part that matters: registration fees on v2 go to the DAO timelock, which has owned the fee-handling contracts since deployment. No voting date has been announced yet.